It’s hard to square the militancy and sheer meanness of those who insist on keeping Christ in Christmas with the Prince of Peace and the celebration of his birth. Are these the same people who have made competitive shopping the forerunning ritual of the feast of the nativity?

Three thoughts:

1. It’s not about the baby. Almost none of the appointed texts for Advent (four weeks worth of Old and New Testament, Psalms, and Gospel) deal with the manger stuff. They are stark and bleak (though not without hope). And when we do get to the infancy narratives we find danger and foreboding: a family on the run, authorities asking for papers, risky border crossings.

When Luke has Mary testify to what Jesus’ life (and death) will mean, it has little to do with cradles and creches and Christmas angels, and everything to do with raw power and the vulnerable poor: “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”

The Christ of Christmas turns everything upside down and knocks everything sideways (like tables in the Temple and our own safe, soft, sentimental faith).

2. It’s not about family values. Create and savor all the family holiday traditions you want — the eating and drinking, the fun and games — it’s all good. But don’t confuse family togetherness (which is usually more imagined than actual) with the good news of the Incarnation: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.”

The Christ of Christmas hardly endorses the agenda of Focus on the Family. In the Church, baptism trumps biology, and thank God for that.

3. It’s not even about Christmas. Easter is the Church’s primary feast, the festival on which hangs “the hopes and fears of all the years.” The feast of the nativity was a minor observance in the Christian year until the mid-nineteenth century when savvy merchants figured out how to exploit it for commercial gain. (Clement Moore’s popular poem also contributed to the American mythology of Christmas: St. Nicholas morphed into Santa, and reindeer, stockings, and sugar plums entered the story).

The Christ mass, by contrast, is “the feast of Nicene dogma” and the Christ of Christmas is the second person of the Trinity, the Logos of God made flesh. But you probably won’t see that on a Christmas card this year (or any year).

For all the preachiness of these three points, I hope there is also a grace-filled word of encouragement in their essentials: The Jesus who comes into the world naked, homeless, and vulnerable is the Christ who comes to each of us in our own places of godforsakenness. And we know this not because of the cradle but because of the cross. The journey to Bethlehem, the risky birth in a barn, the flight to Egypt — these are not mere Christmas-pageant moments in a perpetually-adolescent faith; rather they are reminders of the historical dangers, the sheer contingency on which a mature, disciplined faith must rest: into a world of violence, fear, and misery, God came.

The put-upon silliness of American civil piety notwithstanding, God continues to come, and violence, fear, and misery will not have the last word.

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12 Responses to “It’s Not About the Baby”

Love this, Debra. I’m writing a book I’ve titled “Cross-Eyed Jesus” and the first claim I make is that until we understand him as a “problem child” who makes trouble for everyone around him, friend or for, that no e of the other christological titles matter. They only gain traction when put in that context.

[…] as my Methodist friend Debra Dean Murphy has eloquently pointed out, the Fourth Sunday of Advent is “not about the baby” so much as about Mary testifying “to what Jesus’ life (and death) will mean, it has […]

Believe it or not, we sent out cards last year with a detail from the front plate of John’s Gospel from the St. John’s Bible that reads “And the Word Became Flesh”! We’re going with Luke this year, but next year “And Dwelt Among Us” is tops on my list! Merry Incarnation!?

Three Thoughts
1. Preparing for Christmas often has little to do with preparing for Christ.
2. The worst thing is never the last thing.
3. The reason Christians are sometimes so mean is that, for some, it is more important to be right (and to yield it as a weapon, even feel like they must) than to be like Christ (who couldn’t be more right, yet still executed as a criminal).

For the record, I know lots of people who are concerned with the secularization of Christmas…but I don’t know any of the people lampooned in this blog post. Strawmen abound.

Some of those who have such concerns are my family members, people with whom I thought I was close, until I read this post and realized that it was just my imagination and I wasn’t actually close with them.

Yes, yes and yes. I have asked in several places what would happen if the Church waited to celebrate Christmas in Christmastide- beginning December 25th. That might throw off this ridiculous secular critique.

The front of our Christmas card a few years ago (home-made) was covered with the scary Bible passages surrounding the nativity: Joseph troubled by angels in his dream, Mary and Joseph being turned away from the inn, the slaughter of the innocents, etc. Inside, we wrote, “If your Christmas is not of a Currier-and-Ives quality, you’re in good company.”